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That is very disappointing news. It's strange that you say it's a rather complex thing to do, given that Zoho support this in their free tier of their CRM.

For us, it's not too much of a hassle because we don't generate a huge amount of invoices and can afford to download them and email them ourselves manually.

Just to straighten things out for those who aren't sure of the practicalities of this problem. You should never send an invoice, or any other email from a third party server that doesn't have an SPF and DKIM integration. You should certainly never do so with your email address in the from or reply-to fields. That may be what Xero suggest but most corporate email servers will send emails like that straight to quarantine because they look like phishing attempts.

You shouldn't trust what Xero say about this, because by their own admission, they don't have the necessary expertise in this area to give advice.

There's a few understandably angry folks in the thread. My advice is if you can't live with downloading your invoices and mailing them manually, perhaps because your volume is too high. Then honestly, your best course of action is to switch to a competitor. As Hannah explained, email integration is outside of Xero's capabilities, so they're not going to implement it.

How is it that Xero can send us our invocie emails from there own domain but will not allow us - when we mentioned that, the inovices started appearing from message-service@post.xero.com

There are countless people here who work in IT and know it can be done,

There is countless other online / cloud based services that can get it done whose support it alot smaller than Xero

It therefore appears that the issue is one of advertising.

Not only are our clients not receiving emails, but when clients sent us a remiittance advice, we do not receive it.

We pay xero close to $100 a month, yet another smaller NZ company we pay $10 a month too can and does allow emails sent from our domain via them - therefore it is possible

Are Xero liable for any fraud invoices sent to my clients from their domain?

"a feature of this kind is rather complex". I guess that says something about the Xero development team if this is considered too complex and even free wordpress plugin's offer it.

Majority of the Xero emails to our customers go straight to the spam folders.
We have opted to email from our servers.

it always astonishes me that Xero feels the need to change the look and feel of certain products instead of listening to the community. Invoicing and purchases were working perfectly prior to the look ad feel update. Why not concentrate development on things that aren't working properly?

Hi Hannah.

Thank you your response.

If one could at least add a custom email signature on Xero with a company logo and colours that would promote our own business that would go a long way.
Currently sending from Xero my emails look unprofessional and boring. This is sad coming from an amazing company like Xero.

If there is one thing you can change, and that won't require you to redesign the whole email system, this would be it. It will give users the ability to display their own companies' design and ideas. After all, email should be seen as a form off advertising for ones own company. Won't you agree?

With thanks.

Aubry

Wow! This is spectacular. 10 years of requests/complaints from multiple users to get someone from Xero to spend 5 minutes dumping it in the trash. Well done Xero, we're switching to QuickBooks. At least they don't increase prices 2 times per year. We can get a first-year subscription for the price of two months with Xero. Even after the first year, their prices are still 3 times cheaper. Will recommend everyone to do the same so they can feel the pain.

This is truly ridiculous. Make the current setup the default and allow those who want to do it the right way to do so. If you’re so worried that it will break for some people put it in an advanced section of the preferences and put a warning on it.

Almost 25% of our invoices never make it to the customer. How is that acceptable for an accounting/invoicing app?

Is Xero not going to address the deliverability issues then? This does not seem like it was a productive response to address most of the reasons for the request.

An important and simple request that is now 10 years old - can we please implement this now Xero Team?

basic feature. $5 wordpress extesions provide such features

I can't understand why this isn't already a feature. FreeAgent provides this feature and has for some time. Stripe also has this as an option when using their invoicing. A simple DNS change for users to implement and it's ready to go.

This should be a standard option. I have to manually send all my emails and it is a pain.

I am shocked this is not a feature! None of my clients are receiving the emails and going straight to SPAM. SMTP Server is a basic feature and its insane that XERO has not fixed this issue yet.

Very surprised this isn't a feature.

Marked as spam and never recieved by my customer. EVERY email I have to resend.
Our own SMTP server means control over SPF, etc.

With prices of your product going up, I'd like a few new features like this one!

The inability to send domain-based authenticated mail represents is a cybersecurity threat. They may as well leave a back-door open. If it has not happened yet, the supply chain of a big business with significant financials will be compromised though XERO and will use this very message board to prove that XERO are aware of the risk, were repeatedly reminded... and did nothing. In court they will not be able to claim innocence, liability would be proven, and significant costs claimed.

For the moment, I set all my customers email to whatever@mydomain.com.au and I then manually forward that email to the real customers email address. It does take time, but the email comes from me, has my logo, is sent authorized through my DKIM/DMARC/SPF and my customers know it is ME.

I did for a moment automate this having an individual email address per customer with automatic forwarding, but I often add a short note to the email. Rather than adding the text in XERO, I just add it in Outlook now. When customers reply, it is also comes to me.

Perhaps if everyone reminds XERO of litigation risk, maybe profit loss will be there motivation??

As a result of the invoices coming from message-service@post.xero.com my client is unable to send direct to their main supplier as another one of their suppliers uses that email address and every supplier has to have a unique email address. As a result my client now has the cumbersome job of having to email the invoice/statement to their own email address and forward direct from it. Defeats the purpose of having xero for invoicing. Client not impressed and will likely revert back to Sage. Something xero must in my opinion address ASAP.

@Tim Sneller

What you're suggesting is that xero could have an in-built email client, configurable perhaps using IMAP or POP to send emails through your own email server. That's possible and would work for many customers, you're right.

That said, what most accounting and crm software does is a little different and It's not as difficult as you might think. Emails for a particular domain don't have to come all from the same server. If they did, applications like Gmail for business and Office 365 wouldn't be able to work.

It's possible to send emails for a domain from any server, provided, the DNS records for that domain allow it. In fact, that's how email is always set up these days, there's nothing unusual about it. Without being too technical, you'll see terms like SPF, DKIM and DMARC referring to the settings that need to be put in place in your domain's DNS record.

As others have said, it's not in the least bit dodgy, fake or even unusual, it's just basic email setup. I get that some people might not be comfortable, but there are step-by-step guides on the internet to do this and as a last resort, folks who really can't manage it can use the existing workflow.

Very disappointing this hasn't be done yet. With so many emails going out from Xero they may get overlooked or be unrecognised by new customers and or caught in spam. (Xero even this acknowledge this see https://central.xero.com/s/article/Contact-not-receiving-an-email-sent-through-Xero).

I am an email hosting company and email hosting expert.
Xero have two options. Yes, they could do some programming work to facilitate their servers connecting via OAuth2 to either smtp.gmail.com or smtp.outlook.com. However, it is possible for them to send out emails for accounts@customerdomain.com from their own email servers, *without* causing a problem with Google and other provider flagging it as SPAM. This is done by the insertion of the correct SPF and DKIM entries into the DNS control panel of the customer's domain name (eg at GoDaddy, or wherever else the domain name in question is registered). Once this is done, Xero's SMTP servers will be able to send out perfectly kosher emails with the right SMTP headers so as not to be flagged as spam.

Plus in any event, lots of our outgoing invoices and statements are ALREADY being flagged as spam right now, because of Xero's inaction and inattentiveness to this topic. We do not need Xero to deliver a perfect solution in terms of email deliverability - that's not possible anyway. We only need them to improve deliverability of outgoing emails substantially, which it is absolutely within their remit and gift to do, they're just choosing not to.